Defense Department employees can expect furlough notices as soon as Thursday and then will have a seven-day window in which to appeal their place on the furlough rolls, the Pentagon said Monday.

Acting in response to the across-the-board budget restrictions imposed by March 1’s sequestration, the department must send its first notices, telling workers that they could be furloughed, from March 21 to 25; employees will have from March 28 to April 1 to appeal whether they should be furloughed; and the first official furlough notices will go out March 29, according to an announcement.

The first furlough will begin April 25, and then furloughs will extend over 11 pay periods from April 21 to Sept. 21. The Pentagon said those dates were “subject to change,” but they correspond with what top leaders have said before about how quickly they’d need to furlough many of the department’s roughly 800,000 civilian employees.

Uniformed service members are exempt from the furloughs, but defense leaders have warned Congress that they expect even active-duty units to experience some problems from sequestration given the close connections of the military and civilian parts of the department. Africa Command, for example, which is overseeing the U.S. forces assisting the French campaign against extremists in Mali, must furlough about 800 of its approximately 2,000 workers.

Defense officials have said they hope Congress would forestall the need for furloughs by undoing sequestration, but Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said in a speech on Monday that he thought it would stay in effect at least for the rest of the fiscal year.

"We're not going to be able to avoid" sequestration this fiscal year, Levin said in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, but he said he did hold out hope for changes farther down the road.

Levin said sequestration could be altered if Congress passes a budget and appropriations bills through regular order for the new 2014 fiscal year, but standalone legislation voiding sequestration seems unlikely, he said.

Tim Mak contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 3:51 p.m. on March 18, 2013.